General Feedback for POE 2 Early Access As a Newish Player to the Series

I wanted to give my feedback for the game given I have been playing for a couple hundred hours, and have gone through most of the endgame (I have yet to beat the delerium, ritual, or expedition pinnacle activities more on that later). First lets start with what I think the game is doing well:

Positives

1. the game feels really good to play. Except for witch and sorceress (maybe i need to get further with them). The WASD movement feels good, there's a good feel to the weight of movement, everything dies in a glorious chunky explosion, it just feels good to play.

2. As much as the endgame is definitely not fleshed out at the moment (more on that later) this is a very solid base. There are multiple layers in how you can buff nodes via towers and waystones to add activites and better drops that is pretty satisfying to do when you successfully pull it off.

3. The bosses are excellent. These are souls quality bosses and for a game like this, good bossfights are rare to comeby.

4. There is potentially infinite build potential and freedom with the skill system.

5. The campaign is pretty good so far, in fact the campaign experience is better than the endgame experience, but there is on key reason for that I will get into below.

Criticisms:

Punishments for Death When At Maps:

What strikes me as extremely weird is that as soon as you get to maps, death really matters. In fact, death matters way to much. So I remember watching your stream and you guys said that you weren't having problems with waystones. I can understand why you said that, but its genuinely not understanding the players, especially newer players, very well.

Yes, you do get a lot of waystones, if you LIVE. However, what happens when you die? If you die, you currently lose:

1. the waystone you put in the map
2. all the activites that were on the map
3. everything that dropped in the map
4. tower buffs
5. 15% exp for some reason that i still dont understand
6. any materials you put into tower tabs or waystones
7. I must redo the map i just failed

Waystones specifically arent as bad of a problem once you have been doing t15s for a while. However the other 4 start to get significantly much more worse. The 1 death would be as bad if most of my deaths werent 1 shots or being stunned into 1 shots. Even then, maps are what I presume is a generalized grinding type activity, but it feels like i'm walking a tight rope. If I die, i lose all of the things described in that list.

Now waystones and the mats put into the waystones arent as bad at higher levels but are much much worse at lower levels. You are just getting into maps and you barely have anything. So, dying at all in the beginning of map sets you back hard waystone and mat wise. However, exp isn't as big of a deal and you dont have the tower buffs at all. Still though, you can easily find yourself in a situation where you can't progress the atlas skill tree.

On the inverse of this is when your at high level. Like I said, waystones and the juicing mats arent as bad, but what is completely awful is the experience, the activities on the node, the tower buffs, and just the general knowledge that you arent able to go to the next area and have to redo the map. Levelling past 90 is a genuinely sisiphyian task. Losing an hour+ of experience to a random one shot makes me turn the game off. I hate it. Especially since so much of endgame progess at that point is trying to get to the pinnacle bosses, the activites become much more important and so are the tabs.

We are punished way too hard for dying in a game with the random 1 shots as they exist. This needs to be toned down, or we need more lives in maps. We have 6 portals, from what I understand you get more lives in POE 1. I can tell you I had way more fun and was way more relaxed on Arbiter of Ash because I had 6 tries, but was then annoyed to realize I lost all my experience (4 tries for first kill). I really don't think this is a good hill for you to die on. Its more fair if I lose all those things after dying several times, but once? This I think has the greatest potential to turn people off to this game more than anything.

Acquisition of Ascendancy Points

So, this definitely was terrible for the first ascendancy I ever got. Every ascendancy after was pretty easy to get except for the 4th ascendancy. In fact for every character but the first, the ascendancies up to the fourth were practically free. However, and this is a big however, this was after grinding trials of the sekhama to be much easier because of my relics and now stacks of gears and currencies.

I am not sure what the logic was behind putting subclasses behind the 2 rouguelikeish dungeons in this game. I remember from POE 1 it was the labyrinth and that was just a dungeon from what I recall. Adding in the honor or in trials of chaos with the only severally negative modifiers makes these activites very tough on first time characters, and frankly I don't know how many people would just drop the game there. There should be an alternative that isn't these, or bring back the labyrinth in someway. I like that the final 1 is tough because of the boss, what I don't like is being forced to interact with those roguelike parts of the game that I may not want to touch.

Itemization:

I don't mind trading being in the game, and I like the currencies that we trade (except the divine orb to exalted orb ratio is currently insane). What I don't like is that I get virtually everything through trading at a point. I feel like if I didn't, I would have terrible defenses and a maybe decent weapon. All the crafting has no really method of selecting for certain perks. I genuinely think I have never gotten anything good from a chaos orb.

Now, I agree with you guys, we shouldn't have full crafting. However, we need more determinative methods of making items. You guys mentioned in the stream 1 thing and thats we need more greater essences and I couldn't agree more. 348 hours in and I have 2 greater essences, that is pathetic. The other thing that baffles me is expedition.

As its currently set up, you need to get extremely lucky for expedition crafting to be useful at all. The shop item needs a good base for it to be worth interacting with that system at all. Why not allow us to put in any item that we find? It still has pretty significant rng to it, and it gives us an amount of control that I think we could reasonably make armor and weapons out of it while stil need luck for really good to god rolls.

Finally on a side note, uniques. Uniques are for the most part terrible. There's a handful of really strong ones, but for the most part, I level with them, and I put them away forever. Now, some of the effects do look like they are worth experimenting with. However, its a level 12 crossbow. It has level 12 stats, the unique effect offers no scaling, how can i ever possibly use that at high level?

On top of that, you need a boatload of defensive stats to survive in endgame that always seems to find ways to increase in difficult so most of the armor get thrown out the window as well. Expert versions of unique and giving them stats that makes them actually compete with high level gear would help resolve this. Also, just giving them enough affixes just makes them more usable. That may get people to actually use them but if they stay as is, its going to be all yellows.

Endgame Pinnacle Boss Progression:

This only became apparent to me after killing the xesht, arbiter, and zarokh but this progression is confusing. I found zarokh to be the hardest, then arbiter, the xesht. I fought zarokh first, then arbiter, then xesht. This has nothing to do with the order I found them in, this was purely based on fast they died.

Zarokh seems to have more health than both arbiter and xesht and that confuses me a lot. He is 2 ascendancy points, skill points. I know you guys said you want that as an endgame pinnacle goal, but he felt harder to me than arbiter of ash? HP wise, I could melt the arbiter but him, he was a good solid 5 minute fight where I completely ran out of potions. Arbiter died quickly and xesht died even fast, but i fought xesht last. In fact, my 2 kills on xesht were easier than both my first arbiter kill and zarokh kill.

I think I am supposed to be getting to xesht and those types of bosses before arbiter and zarokh? That is literally impossible though. First, the materials needed to fight the activity bosses do not drop in a nearly large enough quantity to get enough to fight them before arbiter/zarokh. You need tabs to force the things you want to spawn as well, and on top of that, I only noticed the breach materials were easier to get after getting my first points in the tree. Yet again the death problem rears its ugly head again because if you die, then you lose all the activities on the map, and all that materials and tower buffs with it.

Finally then there's citadels. Now navigating on some of the map gets really wonkey. There are missing connections between nodes that don't make any sense that halt progression outwards to citadels or just make getting to a citadel what I feel is an unnecessary pain in the ass. I agreed with you guys at first that they were more common that you thought when you could see them, but still there are no enough of them considering that this boss loop is the endgame.

So, I am geuninely confused on which boss you want us going for first. If how difficult things felt to me was any indication, it seems like we should go the activity bosses, arbiter, then zarokh but we cant do that because the materials to access the activity bosses is way too high. Citadels aren't common enough for wahat they are either. However, this progression needs to be cleared up to some degree.

Conclusion:

I think you guys have made the best ARPG on the market. Seriously though if there is anything to take away from this, I really think that 1 death maps and all the death penalties are what hurts the game more than anything. Some of these items would feel less bad if dying didn't snowball into misery in this game. Overall though, I think POE 2 is an excellent game and that toning down the frustrating aspects of it would help significantly.